Remake of Death Wish with Bruce Willis gets panned by critics
It appears that remaking Death Wish with Bruce Willis wasn’t such a brilliant idea after all.
The new incarnation of the vigilante action movie, made famous by Charles Bronson in 1974, has been directed by Eli Roth and finds Willis as a Chicago doctor whose wife is murdered and daughter is brutally attacked.
He then heads out on a vengeful rampage.
Thus far Roth and Willis’s ultra-violent antics have earned them little fanfare, the Rotten Tomatoes rating at the time of writing standing at a lowly 15% ‘fresh’.
Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Nashawaty calls it ‘the absolute wrong movie at the absolute wrong time’.
“With our country currently reeling from the latest in what seems like an endless cycle of sickening school shootings, there couldn’t be a worse moment for a film that not only fetishizes gun violence, but also seems to get off on it,” he writes.
“I’m sure there must have been long hand-wringing debates about whether to shelve the film for a couple of months and let the still-fresh wounds heal. At least I hope so. But whatever the case, the louder and more irresponsible voices in the room seem to have won out.”
In the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang calls the movie ‘a gore-slicked update’ on the original, and a ‘National Rifle Association infomercial’.
“To criticize Death Wish for its indelicate timing would be to suggest that there might ever be an appropriate moment to see it,” he adds.
“A time of Trumpist racism, incoherent gun policy, fear of police, etc., would be fertile subjects for mainstream films that use genre metaphors to address real national debates,” writes The Hollywood Reporter.
“That’s something this Death Wish doesn’t even try to be. Something has gone very wrong in Hollywood when one longs for the moral nuance of a Charles Bronson exploitation flick.”
Things don’t go much better in The New York Times, which calls it ‘an imbecilic misfire’.
“Morally unconflicted about its self-taught shooter, Death Wish promotes a vision of a city whose streets run red and whose residents run scared. It’s ready-made for an N.R.A. ad campaign,” writes Jeanette Catsoulis.
The movie, also starring Elisabeth Shue, Vincent D’Onofrio and Dean Norris, is out in the UK on April 6.
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